Holiday Plans
by Jobey in Error
Summary: It’s only their first year. They don’t really get Sirius yet. 1/1 -- Jan '09 -- Since virtually no one liked it, the ending has now been edited.


**Holiday Plans**

It took them a while to notice that Sirius was being "awfully quiet," mainly because James could usually do enough talking for them all anyway. But around dinnertime people began to catch on. The way Sirius was murderously spearing his broccoli may have had something to do with it.

"You do know that thing's already dead," James observed, with impeccable wisdom.

"What?" Sirius looked up with the confusion of someone who had been interrupted brooding.

"Go easy on that fork," said James, just as comprehensibly. "It never did anything to you."

Sirius shook his head. "Whatever you say."

"You're not tired, are you?" pressed James. "Everyone's going to be up all night, you know. Up for it?"

"Yeah?" said Sirius darkly, with another fatal spearing. "What's the occasion?"

"_Holidays_ start tomorrow," said Peter, with the most annoying "duh!" implicit in his voice.

"Oh boy," Sirius said. But the others weren't very good with sarcasm, especially when all in such high spirits themselves.

---

Still, they all sensed something wrong, and Remus was willing to have a shot at it. After dinner he proposed a game of chess. It was calculated to cheer and fairly generous, because Sirius always beat at chess and was a horrible, crowsome sort of victor.

Sirius shrugged at the offer. "Whatever."

Remus, not used to being the decisive one, hesitated, and then decided it was an affirmative, however ill-natured. He disappeared for a moment and emerged again with Peter's board and two borrowed sets. (Peter's own chess set had as many improvised substitutes as the original pieces. It had been a project all year to fiddle with enchanting the substitutes but so far the results were very erratic. The best piece was a "knight" that had been made from a gumdrop. It would move precisely as you told it to, but in the mirror direction.)

"Why do I get the black ones?" said Sirius, more civilly than before.

Remus blinked. "Because you always do."

"Oh, right, Potter's little joke. Because it's _such_ an original pun! Give me those," he said, a bit snappishly and more than a bit imperiously.

"Are you all right, Sirius?"

"Oh, I'm simply wonderful, Lupin," said Sirius. "Absolutely chipper. And the last person I'd want to discuss it with is you."

"May I ask why?" said Remus, calmly but hurt, as he finished arranging his pieces (Sirius was already done and waiting impatiently on him).

"Because you're always so insufferably cheery. It's a sign of mental weakness, you know," said Sirius, very pleasantly. "Your move."

Remus blinked again and uncertainly moved forward a castle's pawn.

All around them the celebrations were gearing up. It was only a minority of the Gryffindor population, but it was the noisy minority. The seventh-year boys with especially zooey; the seventh-year girls were beginning overdone farewells that involved long hugs and a good deal of sniffling. James had commandeered a supply of small explosive pellets and was organising a campaign that involved him and the second-year boys startling the girls by throwing them as near their feet as they could without actually making a hit. Once or twice Remus suggested that they could give up the game and join in.

"Oh, God, no," said Sirius, with such disgust that Remus winced. "Just make a move, would you?"

Just when the game was at its most complicated heights, and just when Remus thought Sirius was safely calmed down and engaged in the game – Sirius overturned the coffee table.

Pieces bounced all over the place. Several Housemates stared at them.

"You know," said Sirius shortly, by way of explanation, "I have a brother three years younger than us who could give you a queen and a knight and a rook and _still _beat you in under twenty moves – and with_out_ taking two and a half days between each one!"

---

The prefects had stopped the scaring-the-girls sport, and James had somewhat relaxed when Sirius came over, face stony and impassive.

"How'd the game go?" asked James, whose view of it had been blocked by a thicket of bodies. Without waiting for an answer, he went on: "Now what do we do the rest of the night? I can't believe they confiscated the thingies. They weren't even mine."

"Yeah?" Sirius threw himself into the chair beside his. "Whose were they?"

James shrugged. A moment passed in what James took for their usual companionable silence while they watched one of the sixth-year girls sing a very sappy sort of farewell song. Getting tired of this pretty quickly, James cajoled Peter into going over and nicking some of the abundance of food that the older Gryffindors had produced.

"Or we could go get our own," said James, after Peter had went off with the determination of the very nervous. "Want to join us in a kitchen raid?"

Sirius shook his head.

James looked at him in bewilderment. "Oh, come on, Sirius, last night! Let's _enjoy_ it a bit, instead of you sulking."

"Sulking? Me?" said Sirius, in quite a normal voice. "I'm fine."

"All right then. Let's go."

"Think I'll pass."

James sighed in exasperation. "All right. Peter'll come. Where's Remus?"

"Probably gathering up the game," said Sirius, pokerfaced.

"Eh," said James. "It'll go faster if I go without either of them. You sure you're not coming?"

"I'm sure," said Sirius, an edge to his voice.

But the moment James stepped out of the domain of Gryffindor Tower he found Sirius waiting on him and the Invisibility Cloak needed to venture any further. James was not one to press awkward questions; he merely beamed at the sight of his friend and threw some of the cloak over him, whispering "All _right_."

If Sirius was still distant, he wasn't being an active damper, and it was enjoyable, the classic food-snatching run, with a brief scare involving the caretaker and a lot of James's almost intolerably charming patter with the elves and the loss of a bit of pineapple cake on the way back, which they presumed someone's cat got to thoroughly enjoy.

"Or do they?" asked James. "Maybe cats are allergic to pineapple?"

"Fascinating as this speculation is, we might want to continue it _inside_ the Tower."

Once in the Tower, they had to deal with Peter's petulance at being left behind; it was easily conquered by the divvying up of the spoils. The four roommates broke bread together as a sign of a year's solidarity, with more to come. But it was only when Remus and Peter had drifted off for a while that James suggested for the thousandth time that they get together over hols.

"Don't say that. 'Hols.' It sounds prattish." (It must also be pointed out that this was really only the fourth time James had brought this up, not the thousandth. But Sirius thought of it as thousandth and such it was to him that night.)

"Hols hols hols hols hols," said James, all of a breath. "Come on. Ashamed to be seen with me in public, that it?"

James was joking, but Sirius was anything but.

"Do you suppose _your_ parents would want you hanging out with me?" asked Sirius. "Scion of the worst house of purism and privilege? Don't they make rather a production out of despising my sort?"

James waved a hand casually and spoke companionably. "I can get my parents to go with anything I want."

Sirius had readopted that superior little smile that everyone had thought was gone for good after the first patchy month or so of their shared Hogwarts time. "That's right," he said pleasantly, "I forgot you were a pampered mummy's boy."

Dead silence, nothing but blinks.

James was the least suspicious person ever of those he liked, and there was no one he liked so much as Sirius, but even he could not miss the deliberate malice of the comment. Slowly it hit him and slowly he began to flush hotly. "And what's that supposed to mean?"

To cap off the annoyance factor, Sirius examined his knuckles carelessly and didn't reply.

"Well, you know what, mate?" demanded James, rising uncertainly. In his anger and confusion of course his glasses slipped off of one ear, and Sirius snorted audibly. "Well – well – _bugger off_."

Sirius snorted again. It didn't sound at all natural coming out of James's mouth, and James, knowing it as well as anyone, stalked off, and made rather a public business of laughing with the others for longer than Sirius even stayed in the common room. In fact, he went up to their dormitory only about two minutes after this scene, and about three hours before the others came up to find him already – apparently – sleeping.

---

All four of the boys had been sleeping for just over an hour – it was going on one o'clock – when rudely awakened by shrill squawking and cawing, unlike any they had ever heard before, and even shriller screaming. Everyone was sitting bolt upright in minutes, but it soon became apparent that Sirius was looking extremely unconcerned, and that it was Peter doing the yelping. James and Remus leapt out of bed over to Peter, the former throwing a "What the hell did you do to him?" over his shoulder at Sirius.

"I don't know what you mean," said Sirius neutrally. "I've been sleeping."

"You know what, I'm going to knock the stuffing out of you! I'm going to jinx you into next week!"

"I'm _so _scared," said Sirius, in exactly the sort of childish tone you're thinking of.

Peter calmed down soon enough, once it was discovered what it was: James's sleeping owl had been stuffed under his covers. Both the bed's occupants awoke, badly startled, when Peter had rolled over onto the owl in his sleep. Remus was reassuringly listening to Peter's account while James minutely examined and tried to calm down his owl, soothing it by murmurs of "don't worry, we'll do in the git that did this for you, don't worry, there's a girl." But once prepared for the confrontation they found Sirius snoring quite pointedly, and gave it up with bewilderment to have a huddled conference on the farthest side of the dorm.

"I don't know what's gotten into him," said James sadly.

"He didn't even act like this at the beginning of the year," said Peter, ostentatiously rubbing where James's owl had pecked him in wild self-defence. "You know, like he was at first. He wasn't even as bad then."

James sighed and turned to Remus. "So what do you suppose we do?"

Remus blinked confusedly and looked behind him as if to reply, You're asking _me_?

"I mean, do we hex him while he lies there defenceless until we can knock some sense into him, or what?"

"Well," said Remus, "I'm not in favour of hexing him. It would be unsporting. And he would probably be able to take us all anyway."

His sense of honourable Gryffindoristic fair play thus appealed to, James nodded consent.

"All right," he said. "But if he acts like this after we return next September I do get to."

---

It turned out there wasn't much need. Sirius was still quiet the next morning, cool times ten, but there was an apology in his manner nonetheless, and even a certain clinginess as the Hogwarts Express neared the station.

In fact, James couldn't help describing it later – well out of Sirius's earshot – as his "puppy-eyed face." If Sirius had heard he would have killed him, of course.

Fortunately, he didn't. Some five years later, he galloped halfway across the country to James Potter's as a full-grown bear of a dog, not the least bit puppyish in any respect.

Sirius never did get much better at sharing home horrors than this. But by this point, James knew enough of 12 Grimmauld Place to simply mutter, as Sirius passed out with exhaustion on his bed, "Right. Never again."

"'S'at a promise?"

James startled at the mumble from the depths of quilt and grimy half-grown boy. "Merlin's _balls_, Padfoot. You ought to be dead to the _world_. Of course it is."

A slow, dragging silence in the darkness. James's eyebrows had come together again when Sirius muttered once more.

"Don't say anything about to the others. Not without me."

"I'm not going to have to say anything, mate." James's voice was uncharacteristically quiet and serious. "You know?"

Another pause. Almost hesitant, if Sirius Black was ever any such thing.

"Yeah," he said gruffly. "Reckon not."

"Now get to _sleep_, okay? Bloody _hell_."

There was a chuff of some unverbalised emotion. It might have been a laugh.

And when Sirius early the next afternoon, it was to peace for the rest of his holiday.

---

**You either were fascinated or bored to death in an unorthodox-characterization piece like this. REVIEW, and let me know.**


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